LETTER: The public should know more on the bypass boondoggle

I hope Bob Whitney's excellent and frightening open letter to the mayor about the CalTrans boondoggle is made publicly available to all local citizens. He has done us all a favor by summarizing some of the egregious faults of their design.

For instance, a two-way two-lane route is unsafe, because CalTrans totally refuses to place a median divider. This is straight out of the Rove Handbook on pettifogging the issues. If you do not have a central divider on two-lane highways, there are more deaths, as Whitney cites.

So CalTrans rejected a two-way, two-lane option. Why? Because it is unsafe. Why?

CalTrans refuses to construct a median, as if to make sure it is unsafe. No doubt CalTrans PR office will say CalTrans only wants to save lives. So why not add a median? And the answer is no, just no. Aand yet this is precisely what CalTrans has in store for us for Phase One-a dangerous two-way, two-lane route without a median.

This safety concern and others only arrive with Phase Two, but there is no ironclad assurance there will be money for Phase Two-a screaming six-mile long, I-5-style freeway, where drivers can get their final ya-yas out speeding across the valley before spending hours and hours along the slow 30 mph curves of Ecotopia.

Until then, about six years from now, maybe, we get the two-lane, two-way route without a median, nor viaduct access routes in case of emergencies.

Whitney argues for a route along the railroad right of way. If so, don't you think that in between the rails would be a very nice, natural, no brainer kind of place for a central median?

Whitney's article also touches on a number of other issues in environmental impact not considered for the present design.

Above all, the city really needs to look at this crazy thing again. Don't forget, the pi?ce de r?sistance is the gutting of Little Lake itself. The Army Corps of Engineers says it can just move the wetlands to another place-they've never attempted something like this before; it will be experimental.

Anyone with a lick of historical background about the Corps large-scale construction projects will only tremble when they hear this. Please, don't let this happen.